To Be Or Not To Be Happily Ever After

The enemy is vanquished, the world is safe. Our heroes ride off, leaving a land of thankful people waving and cheering behind them. As the sun sets, they fall into a life of peace and ease, living happily ever after.
Or do they?
Today’s post is all about the standard thought of happily ever after. Generally, most people want to see the hero succeed. Through varying amounts of difficulty, he eventually rises above it all to smite the enemy. Some stories venture down the darker path that is failure, or at least success through death, but the majority stick with the former formula.
Why am I bringing this up? Am I saying I have a problem with it? Not at all. I’m a happily ever after type myself. The reason I bring it up is because of something you can find mention of in some of my other posts. Going off the beaten path. Being able to consider everything as a writer, even ideas you wouldn’t use, improves your overall skill. Considering alternatives to the standard sunshine and rainbows of a happily ever after ending will help to improve your overall writing capability. Diversity gives birth to new ideas, and not every story should end in such a way.
Like it or hate it, tragedy and sadness are standard parts of the world. For every victory there is defeat. In every life, a mix of both will be experienced. Writing to this side of things can help you to see choices and consequences characters experience in your writing from a different perspective. Even if you like to write happily ever after books, your characters will still experience some form of tragedy. You’ll be able to write those parts with more skill and foresight because you’ll have experience in writing that tragedy from a less-than-perfect ending perspective. Any suffering or pain will be more believable because you’ll know what it’s like to write more in depth suffering.
This isn’t to say this is the only way to gain this experience. Everyone’s writing style is different, and you can acquire this experience in any number of ways. Writing is like any other form of art though, and expanding your skills and portfolio will only serve to bring all your future projects to another level. Writing something you haven’t written before is a great way to expand your horizons.
Another reason to consider this avenue, at least for me personally, is it can be hard to hurt what you love. As you write a book, and become attached to the characters like they are close friends, it can be hard to write them into painful situations. I have control, why do I have to hurt them like this? Unless your revel in this type of feeling, it isn’t usually enjoyable to bring tragedy raining down on the world you’ve created. As stated above though, suffering is just as much a part of the world as bliss. Not many people are going to want to read a story where nothing bad ever happens. There would be no suspense, no action.
Even though you know you’re going to write them out of it. They’ll recover from this, or they’ll escape that, it still isn’t always easy to make them experience some kind of trauma. You may even lighten the load because you want to get back to the part where they rise above this adversity and win at the end. This is a cornerstone reason of why I mention straying away from happily ever after at some point. Easing the suffering that a character should probably have experienced in a particular situation can be damaging to the story. At the risk of sounding like a sadist, if you’re going to have them suffer, you should make sure to do it right. Readers will appreciate characters that can overcome even the deepest suffering, and you can amaze them or catch them off guard with a story that the main character(s) may not be able to win in the end.
My main point is, it takes all kinds of things to make a story. Just as scenes where the heroes triumph and show unparalleled power can amaze readers, so too can scenes of devastation and powerlessness. Don’t be afraid to think about the losses your characters will experience just as much as the victories. Being able to blend the bad with the good will serve to bring your story to an even greater level.